Voyage of the Devilfish

“Conn, Sonar, trace on broadband bearing three four seven is definite AKULA class, bearing rate left and picking up. Contact is closing, approaching CPA. Recommend course one eight zero to get a second leg.”

“Sonar, Conn, aye,” Culverson replied in his headset.

“Designate the new contact Target One. I’m coming around now to one eight zero to the left.”

“Conn, Sonar,” Dawson said to his microphone, “recommend coming around to the right. You’ll be pointing at the contact. Otherwise you could hit him—”

“No, we’re coming around to the left. Better to hit him than loose him in the baffles. Skipper’s orders.” Dawson shook his head; this was how underwater collisions happened. The word to man tracking stations spread throughout the ship by the watchstanders. The tracking teammembers hurried to their stations. In the control room Culverson was programming the firecontrol solution to Target One into the weapons in tubes three and four when Captain Harrison Toth IV arrived and looked over his shoulder. Culverson looked up at Toth, in his late forties, portly and bald. Not exactly a thing of beauty, but after coming up through the ranks as a former sonar chief he knew more about submarines than just about anyone in the fleet. He also never let his officers forget it. But for all Culverson’s gripes about Toth, he felt relieved to see him on the Conn this day.

WESTERN ATLANTIC

FS VLADIVOSTOK

Captain Dmitri Krakov held onto the handrail of the periscope well as the AKULAclass fleet submarine Vladivostok tossed in the sea off the continental shelf of the United States. Vladivostok had been at her hold-coordinate off the city of Norfolk, Virginia, for some twenty hours, rolling and pitching at periscope depth, waiting for any further mission directive. During the last week the crew had become increasingly edgy, and no wonder. So far Krakov had been unable to tell them exactly what their mission was. He wasn’t sure himself. Now he tapped the deck officer on the shoulder to ask for the periscope. The junior lieutenant quickly moved away from the scope, and Krakov grasped the horizontal periscope grips somehow reassured by the feel of the antiskid etching on the cylindrical grips. He put his eye on the rubber of the eyepiece, still warm from the deck officer’s face, and looked out at the waves splashing and spraying over the periscope-view. If it was sickening to stand in the control compartment in these tossing seas, it was worse looking out the periscope. A queasy stomach was a hell of a condition for a submariner, but there it was.

Krakov waved the deck officer to take the periscope back. He was as impatient as his crew. More so. Like Vlasenko, he had been aboard the Leningrad in 1973, but unlike Vlasenko he had not felt in conflict over the sinking of the American submarine. He was, after all, a military man, raised and trained to destroy the enemy, and the enemy had been… how soon some forgot… the Americans. The politicians had had their way and now the country was being disarmed, destroying its capacity to defend it self. He had long had such feelings, but under the tutelage of Admiral Novskoyy his feelings had not only been kept alive, they had been hardened. It was thanks to Novskoyy that he had risen through the ranks to gain his own command the previous year. The admiral was the man he most admired, most trusted to do what was best and right for him, and for the future of his troubled country. Indeed, he felt very much toward the admiral as a son might toward a father his own having died when he was just entering his teen-age years. It was because of his admiration for Novskoyy that he had chosen the navy and submarine service. If Admiral Novskoyy wanted him here, he had his reasons, and that was good enough for Captain Krakov. Captain… he relished the sound of it, and the responsibility that went with it. He loved it, all of it… except, of course, the secret miseries his stomach still underwent. Well, nothing was perfect…

He thought now of the ultrasecret loading of the SSN-X27, listed on the inventory as an “exercise unit,” loaded in its canister in the number-four torpedo tube. He thought of the nursing of the ship’s mechanical and electrical system in the months prior to this sudden deployment. He thought of the deployment itself, so obviously planned with their food loadout and equipment maintenance, but without immediate warning in the hours before the order to depart the pier. Krakov felt sure that the long, tortuous hours at periscope depth would soon be rewarded. And in a special way that along with the legendary Admiral Alexi Novskoyy, he would be called on to play an historic role. The thought of it was strong enough to overcome even his rebellious stomach.

ARCTIC OCEAN

BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP